CTR SEO – Advanced Click Through Rate Strategies September 2022


All growth hackers and SEO’s understand that the main ranking factors over previous years have been content and backlinks.

But the waters in September 2022 are starting to muddy nowadays and other ranking factors are starting to be rewarded from our testing.

Although this article will explain why and how CTR Manipulation works you need to check out the section on fake traffic and spoofing traffic bots which can trigger your google search console as receiving organic CTR clicks.

When actually this is spoofed traffic and your google search console is incorrect in its data.

Best CTR Traffic Bots

After testing many CTR bots SEO tools and click-through rate manipulation tools here are the best 6 CTR Traffic Bots:

  1. Viper Tools
  2. SERPempire (see our SerpEmpire Review here)
  3. Microworkers
  4. CTR Booster
  5. Mturk (mechanical turk)
  6. SERPclix (check our SerpClix Review)

These six above have been voted to be the best SEO traffic hack tools after a lot of testing.

This has worked well, so the plan is to hit all my tier one and tier two links with this traffic SEO hack also to rank those better as well.

User Behavioural Search Engine

You need to remember search engines are trying to return the best results for the visitors so they have a great user experience in using their search engine and will return again to use.

Google is a user experience company

Backlinks from our testing are diminishing in value month on month.

I am not here to say backlinks do not work because they 10000% do still work well but the power is certainly not as strong as it was a few years ago.

As backlinks diminish it means something new needs to be growing in value and we have found technical SEO with on-page audits for page load speeds and user experience is key to google searches.

What is CTR in Marketing?

CTR is an acronym for the phrase Click Through Rate.

CTR is a super powerful metric used to help Google search rankings for your web properties.

The definition of click-through rate is the percentage of visitors who click your link from their search. In mathematical terms then CTR = Clicks / Impressions.

Google wants to see:

  • How often your listing is clicked on which can be manipulated with click through rate strategies
  • How long users remain on your site which can be part of your click-through rate methods
  • The bounce rate of your site which can be manipulated with CTR
  • If users return to your site
  • Are visits being done on mobile or desktop devices

This data is known as User Behavioural Data which is a key part of what RankBrain monitors.

In SEO, your CTR is going to determine whether you maintain your ranking. Google now has many ways to track click-through rates with analytics, chrome browser and much more. With Google AdWords, your CTR is one of the key components of your quality score also.

TEST CTR FOR FREE TODAY

In a nutshell, you can think of search engines as a democracy: people vote by clicking.  So your CTR will really determine your success. If more people are clicking your links than the competition then your votes are increasing and in turn, will promote you above others with fewer votes.

What Does Google Say About CTR?

Google itself has stated the importance of CTR on several occasions:

  1. “user reactions to particular search results or search result lists may be gauged, so that results on which users often click will receive a higher ranking.” – Here is the Google Source patents.google.com/patent/US8938463
  2. “using click and visit data to rank results is a very reasonable and logical thing to do, and ignoring the data would have been silly. […] It’s pretty clear that any reasonable search engine would use click data on their own results to feed back into ranking to improve the quality of search results. Infrequently clicked results should drop toward the bottom because they’re less relevant, and frequently clicked results bubble toward the top.” – Here is a Google Engineer Source: www.quora.com/Did-Bing-intentionally-copy-Googles-search-results
  3. “In addition, click data (the website links on which a user actually clicks) is important for evaluating the quality of the search results page. As Google’s former chief of search quality Udi Manber testified: The ranking itself is affected by the click data. If we discover that, for a particular query, hypothetically, 80 per cent of people click on Result No. 2 and only 10 per cent click on Result No. 1, after a while we figure out, well, probably Result from 2 is the one people want. So we’ll switch it. Testimony from Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt confirms that click data is important for many purposes, including, most importantly, providing “feedback” on whether Google’s search algorithms are offering its users high-quality results.” – In Google Lawsuit Source: graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/img/ftc-ocr-watermark.pdf

Straight from Google Search Engine, you can see that User Behavior Signals are a huge ranking signal they use within their algorithms.

Is CTR The Future of SEO?

In short, my opinion is no click-through rate is not the future of SEO on its own. However, it is certainly a very important part of the jigsaw in September 2022. According to search metrics ranking factors then CTR is the number one ranking factor.

My personal opinions are that content and backlinks will get you so far in ranking your websites into the top 5 positions. Then from there, although more backlinks will strengthen your site further, then engagement including CTR, dwell time and bounce rates start to play huge parts in your ranking factors.

Does SERP CTR affect rankings?

Yes from many studies it is proven that CTR improves rankings if the dwell time of the visitor is good. This articles from Rand on CTR proves this concept works. Rands test study moved his site from #7 to #1 in less than 3 hours by sending clicks to his SERPs. These were real people, making real clicks. This was the first proof that SERP CTR was a factor that could heavily move the SERPs.

SEO + UX = Success

These days, SEO best practices include consideration for the user experience (UX). Do you have quality content that makes visitors want to stay and engage? Is your site secure, fast and mobile-friendly? From ranking to clicking on your site and spending time on your site than are you returning good user experience results back to search engines?

Think of the partnership of SEO and UX this way: SEO targets search engines, and UX targets your website’s visitors. Both share a common goal of giving users the best experience.

Here is proof user experience is very important to integrate into your strategy. In Google’s own words in their patent they say this below “results on which users often click will receive a higher ranking”:

User reactions to particular search results or search result lists may be gauged, so that results on which users often click will receive a higher ranking. The general assumption under such an approach is that searching users are often the best judges of relevance, so that if they select a particular search result, it is likely to be relevant, or at least more relevant than the presented alternatives.

SEO Traffic Hacks

If CTR many say is the future of SEO then I need to try and find some SEO traffic hacks. CTR Simulation has been known for many years, it used to be an extremely simple way of improving ranking – search for a keyword, find your site, click-through and send Google a signal to your site rank higher.

The essence of RankBrain is – the value of the link is in direct proportion with visitors activities on the page and the site. So backlinks need to come with the justification of the links with social and traffic. This is why high traffic citation sites, even with no follow links, even with redirect links, help to improve ranking. Now you can send both search and click bots to your tier one links and increase the value of your backlinks.

Crowd Search Optimisation

Crowd Search Optimisation is where an army of browsers can enter your website and keywords into the search results and click onto your link. As doing this directly improved your rankings because the algorithm optimises rankings using CTR metrics. Here are some references on why crowd search optimisation works:-

Let’s say Mary is shopping for a new camera. She goes into Google and searches for “best digital camera.” She clicks on the 5th website on the results page and hangs around that website for a period of time reading the information. Chances are that website fulfilled her needs. Now imagine if thousands of people did exactly the same thing. Google now has “proof” that this website is relevant and useful, so it bumps that website higher up in the rankings. At its core, this is the paradigm that CrowdSearch is leveraging.

One particular ranking factor that Google appears to be placing more weight on in recent months is user search behaviour, clickthrough rate and dwell time. It is one ranking factor that they can monitor FULL metrics for and it links in directly with their full user base. Whatever SEO techniques you carry out for your sites, add CrowdSearch to your toolbox. It’s certainly a “must have” for mine!

Worst CTR Traffic Bots

After a lot of testing, we have certainly found over 80% of the CTR traffic bots to do zero for our ranking.

The problem is like in every industry is people try to replicate products or tools and create fake alternatives.

On places like Fiverr there are a dozen CTR Manipulation gigs that spoof Google Search Console with data that shows organic traffic but the total number of organic click through rate long tail queries is incorrect.

Proxies Are The Key To Success

Proxies are very very important because when you use free proxies it comes from data center and google know and flag it instantly.

So if you try to use free proxies to access google you’ll get “Failed to connect”.

When you use residential, the source did not come from the datacenter, it comes from real ISPs like Orange (in France).

That makes the difference.

Does CTR Manipulation Work?

This is the million-dollar question at masterminds that splits opinions because from testing many get results and many do not.

There is a great argument to say it is the settings being used for the websites as it needs to look natural.

My personal opinion is that it 100% works when set up correctly but it is a huge risk because the settings have got to be spot on.

If you read this article it explains if a page is ranking in position 3, but gets a higher than expected CTR, Google may decide to rank that page higher because tons of people are obviously interested in that result. So the aim of the game is this:

Get your pages to get higher than expected CTR in the SERPs to the expected average. Build this CTR volume up as you climb the rankings but be careful you do not send too much manipulated traffic because Google can detect bot traffic if overkill

Rand Fishkin CTR Experiment

Rand Fishkin, an SEO consultant from the renowned MOZ software, conducted a case study on increasing CTR.

CTR SEO Case Study Rand Fishkin

By increasing the number of searches from SERP to his website, his site went from #7 to #1 on targeted keywords.

Organic Click Through Rate Tricks

As part of your SEO strategies if CTR Manipulation is not something you want to carry out then here is some tricks to boost your total number of organic clicks:

  • Title Tags – Your meta title tag can be eye-catching in the SERPs to attract more clicks from your competition. Try to get the title tags to stand out with emojis and an engaging meta title description of what the page is about
  • Meta Descriptions – Although many say meta descriptions are not a direct Google ranking factor then they certainly are a secondary. Create engaging and clickbait worthy meta descriptions to get your searchers to click your result in the search engines results page
  • Check Google Search Console all pages with low CTR which rank on the first page of the SERP and tweak to attract more clicks

Trying to achieve a higher CTR of organic click through rate manipulation will improve your rankings on search engine results pages.

Popular Questions

Can You Manipulate CTR?

You can manipulate CTR in the search engine results to mimic user behaviour along with user-generated signals to deceive search engines into believing a website is more authoritative than it is.

Click through rate manipulation can be utilised by webmasters as an organic traffic strategy

Google, Bing and other search engines can all have CTR SEO strategies with implementing ctr manipulation.

Does click through rate affect search engine results?

SERP results that have a higher than expected CTR have been known to improve, and those with lower CTR to decline.

CTR manipulation is great for CTR SEO as can increase organic click-through rate which is an important ranking factor.

What Does Chris Palmer Think About CTR SEO?

Chris Palmer says “Understanding what CTR means you need to understand that click-through rate is first divided from the amount of traffic or impressions a website or ad receives. By manipulating click-through you are increasing the threshold of clicks to the ratio of impressions for a given keyword increasing the web assets popularity.”

As an experienced online marketer Chris Palmer is always someone to follow when the latest hacks come out with user behavioural signals.

Conclusion

Chris Palmer and Craig Campbell have recently had a battle sending real people via their email address, web properties, social media, email list to direct traffic as a search engine optimization technique and SEO tactics to promote their web page.

From the testing I know 100% that CTR is a ranking factor and helps your website.

However, whether these bots and tools are clever enough to manipulate human behaviour is something I need to find out.

TEST THE BEST CTR TOOL

I have my reservations because Google biggest concern will be search and click manipulation for their AdWords.

So they have probably put most resources into combating this but let’s see over the next few months where these results take us.



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